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Memphis was thoughtful. What had happened inside the rift and in the days before had dismantled him utterly. The Memphis who left the land of the dead was a different Memphis, the atoms Ling spoke of so often with reverence rearranged. They had not settled. He was vibrating at a new frequency. His Diviner power as he’d known it had left him after he’d healed the rift. But it was not gone so much as it had changed. He felt it now when he laid his hands upon the page. A healing of words and ideas. Every day, he went to the 135th Street Library to write until Mrs. Andrews teased that she might have to give him a job there. Memphis felt life all around him now. From the secretaries hurrying to their jobs in the big office buildings, humming with busyness, to the old men buying their cigars on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street. The street sweepers and the beat cops, the shoeshine boys and the chorus girls. The cheerful drunks searching for god in the gutters, the little girls playing dress-up in newspapers but seeing them as silk gowns. The searchers. The strivers. The lost. The lonely. The hurting. The hopeful. He felt them all. And every dreamer who stepped outside to look up past the neon haze into the souls of stars watching them below. They were with him. They were all with him. Connected. On the way to see his friends, as the bus jostled its way downtown, Memphis had noticed a small sign propped against the window of a building on the West Side. Hand-painted, it read, simply: I BELIEVE IN THE VOICE OF TOMORROW.
“Memphis?” Evie prompted again, breaking his reverie.
“I don’t know,” Memphis said. He was no longer so easily defined. He was possibility. He was becoming. He smiled. “I don’t know… yet.”
“Yet,” Evie echoed in sympathy.
“I’m gonna play baseball!” Isaiah said, nudging the conversation toward a kind of loose joy, a shifting of atoms again.
“So, uh, how are your powers?” Sam whispered.
Memphis shook his head slowly. “Just a little left. Enough to fix your bruise, maybe.”
“I said Don’t see me to a fella the other day and he looked right at me and said, ‘What do you mean, don’t see you?’ I guess my pickpocketing days are truly behind me,” Sam said.
“I picked up this saltshaker, and do you know what it told me?” Evie said.
Ling swallowed a bite of sandwich. “What?”
Evie put the shaker back down. “Pos-i-tutely nothing.”
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sp; No more dream walking. No bursting into flames. No more ghosts.
“I don’t see so much anymore. Just little things here and there,” Isaiah said with a shrug.
That was about all the future anybody should probably see, Evie thought.
The powers that Project Buffalo had forced on them were fading away. What remained was all they had been through together. They could still feel one another, still sense one another’s moods and hurts. What remained was friendship. What remained was love. It was, they knew, their greatest power.
Mrs. Goldberg fiddled with the radio until a flood of German poured out.
“Whatcha listening to, Mrs. G?” Sam asked.
“A political rally in Nuremberg,” she answered tightly.
It was astonishing that a wire was picking up this sound in Germany and carrying it via a transatlantic cable all the way to this deli in New York City, as if the world were so easily connected, all one big ball. It didn’t hurt that Sam and Evie had used some of the last dregs of their Diviner power to soup up the Goldbergs’ radio so they could listen to news and music from back home.
The man on the radio was shouting. He sounded very angry. When he paused, the crowd responded with chants. Mr. Goldberg had stepped out from the kitchen. He was listening to the angry, shouting man. Listening to the people clamoring for him. He came to Mrs. Goldberg’s side. Evie watched as the couple clasped hands. They did this without a word, almost without thought, she could see. It was instinctual, animal. They were frightened, and they each sought comfort from the other.
“Do you know what he’s saying?” Evie asked her friends.
“Beats me. I don’t speak German,” Theta said.
Behind the counter, the Goldbergs stood perfectly still. Outside, there were ripples of excitement. The noise began to swell. The aviator was approaching. The Diviners kept their eyes on the Goldbergs, who, in turn, watched the radio as if it needed watching, as if it might become a monster they could not stop. Evie listened closely to the German chants coming through the radio speakers. That crowd was getting louder, too. And though she didn’t know German, it made her uneasy all the same. She sensed the fury underneath it. Seeds of evil. Growing. Metastasizing. The chant repeated several times, and she began to pick out the words being shouted over and over again: “Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler.”
Mrs. Goldberg looked into her husband’s eyes. “Max?” she said, worried.
Out on the street, the motorcade drove by at last, below balconies draped in red, white, and blue. The hero lifted his arm in acknowledgment of the crowd. The citizens screamed, and the cheer became a roar.
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, and as such, certain liberties have been taken in order to “make it work” (thank you, Tim Gunn), starting with the fact that, as far as I know, there are no supernatural entities roaming the streets of New York. Well, other than the subway rats. But that’s another story. Timelines have been conflated here and there. For example, Charles Lindbergh’s New York City ticker tape parade happened in June of 1927, but Hitler’s Nuremberg rally—arguably the beginning of the rise of the Nazi Party—happened in August of 1927. But while this is a work of fiction, it incorporates aspects of our very real history: the KKK, the American eugenics movement, Fitter Families tents, Jim Crow laws, xenophobia, the racial injustice and government-sanctioned abuse enacted upon African Americans caught up in the tragedy of the Great Mississippi Flood—abuses of power that victimized them twice. All of that is true. It continues to haunt us today.
It has taken me nearly ten years to write this series. When I started, all I knew was that I wanted to tell an American ghost story. I had no idea where that story would take me, or that the writing of it would coincide with such a tumultuous and divisive period in America, one containing within it the echoes of our unresolved, often unacknowledged past. I believe that with every book we write, we are changed, but nothing I’ve written has so fundamentally challenged and changed me as the Diviners has. The necessary research involved in the writing of this series forced me into an unavoidable, often uncomfortable dialogue with my identity as a white American. It forced me to understand how hundreds of years of white supremacy in this country have created a distorted lens on race and actively suppressed narratives from the marginalized whenever those stories proved inconvenient for this hegemonic viewpoint. It forced me to understand how every time there was a push toward greater equality for all Americans, especially Americans of color, there was a power play by white America not only to impede that progress but to reassert dominance and reestablish oppression through everything from perception-shaping to laws—and the criminal justice system entrusted to enforce those laws—to acts of inhuman violence. It has forced me to grapple with how easy it is to be complicit if we don’t interrogate ourselves about our false inheritance.
It has made me think about the mythmaking we do, both as a country and as individuals going about our daily lives. The way the narratives we create can be used to obfuscate facts, to manipulate a populace, or to allow ourselves deniability of wrongs; the way narrative—especially the stories of those who have lived these injustices firsthand—can be used to bring truth into the open. Story is powerful. I believe we can write a better one together going forward. But only if we are willing to truly see and reckon with our ghosts. And we are surrounded by them. They are there on the prairies where the buffalo once roamed, where the subdivisions and chain stores now spread out against the frayed horizon. They are there in the ports where the auction blocks stood and on the hills where the “witches” were hanged. They are there on the Trail of Tears and on the edges of the reservations. They are there in the shadows, trying to move into the light. They are with us always. They are talking to us.
